This is an exciting paper that adds to the exceptional work from Clay Reid using calcium imaging to ask some important basic questions about cortical processing.

This paper asks if the projections to the higher visual areas from V1 are functionally specific or not. They frame the question as having two possibilities (excerpts from the paper and figure below):

1. “One possibility is that the net input from V1 to each target area reflects the diverse visual response tuning of all V1 neurons (Fig. 1a, top). In this model each higher visual area receives the same input, and its functional properties may be determined through local computations. “

2. “Alternatively, V1 may provide functionally distinct input to each downstream area (Fig. 1a, bottom). In this model, these target-specific projections could account for the specialization found in the higher visual areas.”

This paper is a good example of the increase in work being published on the mouse visual system There is a big movement headed up by Dr. Reid and Christof Koch at the Allen Brain Institute called Mindscope. It will be interesting to see how it works out. You can read about Mindscope in a Nature commentary here. Also Dr. Reid and Dr. Kock have been presenting a really great lecture series called, “Coding & Vision 101” you can check out here! I highly recommend it if you are interested in the visual system and interested in a good general overview.

Speaking of the mouse visual system, there was a great bundle of papers published last year on some functional mapping from the Reid and Callaway labs. It’s kind of funny that the two papers have almost identical titles 🙂

Really detailed beautiful exploration of functional connectivity using the channelrhodopsin-2-assisted circuit mapping technique. If you aren’t familiar with this technique it is based on the beautiful caged glutamate mapping that Gordon Shepherd (Jr.) and Karel Svoboda refined, but in many ways even better 🙂 You can read about it from two early papers using the powerful technique here and here.